Building Simple Formations in Large Societies of Tiny Mobile Robots
Bastian Degener, Barbara Kempkes, Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide · Procedia Computer Science · 2011
We envision that in the future lots of tasks that are handled nowadays by few but complex mobile robots will be performed by huge swarms of tiny robots. This way the system becomes more robust against single failures and cheaper, since the robots can be very simple. As a prerequisite, the robots have to be able to form given formations in order to organise their work. We review new strategies that perform the task of building a simple line with robots that are limited to see only their direct surrounding. As energy is the main limiting factor, we analyse how the two main energy consumers (energy for sensing and energy for motion) are affected by our algorithms.